Megaoverlord12 said:
I guess I should have specified Western third parties. Going by VGChartz
Lego sold better, but it was originally a Wii U exclusive, so that's more or less expected plus Lego usually sell pretty decently on Nintendo hardware, likely due to the younger demographics. I don't really have many other good examples for comparison considering that most western third party games on Switch so far are late ports, so direct comparison is unfair. Going by the games that you mentioned (and some other late ports):
Now are these most of these bad figures? I wouldn't say they are, but beyond L.A. Noire (for some reason), all of them are unquestionably lower than XB1/PS4. Now is that fair, considering the Switch's significantly lower install base? Again, not particularly. Still the point remains that major third party games sell less on Nintendo hardware. As for the developers touting high sales on Switch? Those are almost universally indies. You see Team Meat and Team17 happy. Do you see Bethesda touting how successful Doom or Skyrim was? EA with FIFA? No, because they weren't impressive. I want to be crystal clear. I do not think that indies are lesser. I do not think they are not important. They aren't lesser and they are important. HOWEVER, indies need lower numbers for the Switch to outsell other consoles, something that is greatly helped by the lower quantity of games on the platform. An indie selling 10k is a success, 100k massive, 1m unthinkable. But EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, etc? Needs more than that. All of this is on top of what many others here have said, that porting to the Switch takes time. If a game started development in 2015/16 for release in 2017/18, most AAA's literally CAN'T have a Switch version ready around launch. |
Besides the indies,there was a bunch of japanese devs expressing success on Switch. Bandai, Koey, Capcom, NIS, Square, already gave multiple reports about how their Switch releases selling above expectations and how they will improve their support on the platform. From other devs I can remember Ubisoft also expressing good sales, but to be fair besides Mario + Rabbids their other releases were old ports and party games,so the expectations maybe weren't that high.
OP: like many others already said,most of thirds were not on board with the Switch at launch because of the Wii U third party disaster. A big game takes a lot of time to port and again,many of the powerhorse games will not end on Switch. That said,we had a few great surprises with thirds last year and I think we will have more this year.
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